Impudence, Sir, Sheer Impudence

In his history of England, the great classical liberal Thomas Macaulay continually used the word “impudent” to describe the proceedings of the English kings as they labored to find new ways of invading their subjects’ liberties. The word has ironic truth. We think of someone as “impudent” when he lodges obnoxious objections to the doings of people holding justified authority — but unjustified authority is impudence as well, and it is almost always worse.

This is the year of impudence.

President Obama impudently spends trillions he doesn’t have, and sends the bill to us, and future generations, as if only he and his friends mattered. His friends, in turn, spend virtually all their time telling us things that aren’t true, as if we weren’t smart enough to detect the fraud.

Government labor unions impudently insist that the nation, and the citizens of every state and city, must bankrupt themselves in order to provide luxurious retirements for people who, in many cases, impudently didn’t do a lick of work while they were “employed.”

Now justifiably-former Senator Santorum impudently lectures a nation of other adults about the evils of the “pandemic” of “pornography,” insisting that he knows it is “toxic” for marriages, “relationships,” and, I suppose, the birds and the bees, and promising that he will try to ban it.

Anyone who knows anything about what Santorum’s website calls “relationships” can think of some that may have been saved by the judicious use of “pornography.” (Yes, and some that may have been harmed. Is that the business of the law, or Sexologist in Chief Santorum?) And it would be funny, if it weren’t so cruel, to think about federal agents swooping down on some 90-year-old widower in North Dakota who, like the old bathtub-gin artists, whiled away his hours making his own dirty stories and pictures, and possibly purveying them to some other old degenerate.

But the major effect of Santorum’s remarks — nay, of his very being — is impudence, sheer impudence. Who does this man think he is? What item in the Republicans’ limited-government agenda does he suppose gives him, or any other politician, the right to act as Father Inquisitor to fellow adults?

Of all the year’s disgusting performances, this, to me, is the most disgusting, because it is the most impudent.

So far.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.